Rescuers said Sunday nine miners trapped in a flooded coal mine in east China for 180 hours are almost certainly dead after they searched the shafts where they believed the miners to be but found no sign of them, Xinhua reported. The rescue workers found spare working clothes and some mining tools abandoned by six trapped miners in a shaft section but found no sign of them after combing the area, according to the rescue headquarters. The nine miners were believed to be either buried under debris from a shaft collapse or swept to the bottom of the mine by floodwater, the headquarters said. The flooding occurred around 3:30 a.m. last Sunday at Lingxian coal mine, a township-owned mine in Le'an County of central Jiangxi, trapping ten people. One miner, Huang Guigen, 45, was rescued Wednesday afternoon. Huang was working alone when the flooding occurred and the area where he was in was not inundated. Rescuers are still pumping water and clearing the debris of collapsed shafts.
